TrevorR

I like Talk and of all the Rabin era ones I probably listen to that most. Some lovely tunes and vocal harmonies on that album.

He does play a groovy bass, though. Used to be in Linda Ronstadt’s backing band, you know!

Heres the full piece in easier to read on a phone form... IT STARTED WITH A DISC: CLOSE TO THE EDGE - YES Some would call it the pinnacle of an entire genre. Others might say it’s the moment its creators attained the perfect expression of their muse. Many would claim it represents the jewel in the crown of progressive rock’s Year Zero. Audacious! Virtuosic! Majestic! Perfect! Personally, I hated it. Couldn’t get it at all. Well, there was that bit at the start which just seemed to be random noise. Then it seemed to ramble on for ages, never getting anywhere. And what the heck was a “Khatru” and why were they so popular in Siberia? What a complete waste of three pounds and twenty-nine pence. It even had the single most boring mud brown album cover I’d ever seen. A cassette-tape was unceremoniously flung to the back of a bedroom cabinet and forgotten. Not the most auspicious start for a candidate for It Started With A Disc. How could this be my initial reaction to an album which I now count as pivotal to my personal and musical development? Well, perhaps there is a little more to the story. In the period from 1976 to 1979 I never bought into the punk ideal. That type of music wasn’t really for me. No, I was a heavy rock fan. Led Zeppelin, Thin Lizzy and Deep Purple were my listening staples. These sat uneasily alongside an unhealthy (I presumed then) interest in Abba, The Electric Light Orchestra and other chart pop. But we didn’t talk about those. If there was any other genre that I was likely to listen to it would be rock and roll or rockabilly - influenced by the kids I hung around with at youth club. If we were going to play ‘C’mon Everybody’ it would be Eddie Cochran’s original, not some crappy punk cover. So my reaction to Close To The Edge wasn’t some clichéd knee-jerk “Load of rock dinosaurs” rant. I had genuinely expected to enjoy it. The fact that I didn’t get it at all was a bitter disappointment. My rock tastes were already starting to branch out in a more prog direction and I had heard the odd Yes tune that I really liked. A compilation album contained the squelchy synths and wah guitar of ‘Don’t Kill The Whale’. ‘Wondrous Stories’ was regularly heard on the radio. Yes was a band I was determined to check out. Yes was a band I fully expected to love. So one afternoon in 1979 I found myself upstairs in Truro’s Saffron Records, rifling through the LP racks, pocket money jangling temptingly in my trouser pocket. There were so many exotically designed covers tempting me in. Was today the day to buy some Yes? Or perhaps I should finally plump for a copy of Brain Salad Surgery, scary looking cover or not? The triple album glory of the live album, Yessongs, was further than my pocket money could reach. Similarly some of the newer LPs. But then I spied a drab little cassette sitting forlornly in the racks with a sticker proclaiming, £3.99 £3.29. Done! When I got it home I slipped the cassette into my tiny hand-me-down cassette player. There seemed to be some louder than usual hiss coming from the speaker which suddenly exploded into an unintelligible noise. Little was I to know that the minuscule mono speaker was in no way equipped to deal with the subtleties of the rainforest sounds which coalesce into a free-jazz influenced intro section on ‘Close To The Edge’. For the remaining twenty minutes of side one the cassette player struggled manfully on, signally failing to deliver anything near the high fidelity sound which the music demanded. Side two didn’t fare any better and so the cassette was unceremoniously chucked in a cupboard. Fast forward six months and my birthday present meant I was finally freed from the vagaries of hand-me-down audio equipment. Resplendent in my bedroom sat a brand new Sharp music centre... Record player, cassette deck, AM/FM radio and three glorious watts per channel of stereo sound. As I consigned my cassette player to the cupboard a dusty cassette fell out and bonked me on the head. “Oh, that! Well, I suppose I should give it more than just one listen. It can’t sound any worse on the new hi fi.” That said, I wasn’t holding up much hope as I slipped it into the cassette deck and pressed “play”. What a revelation. A torrent of sound cascaded from the speakers; chaotic but yet revealing of a subtle structure. Chris Squire’s bass wrestled with Steve Howe’s spiky guitar lines until suddenly punctuated by a complex vocal harmony. Gradually a compelling melody emerged, driven by the bass and underpinned by Rick Wakeman’s Hammond organ and Morse code Moog synth. Forty short minutes later the cassette mechanism clicked off as side two finished. I was hooked. A lifetime love of prog and Yes was underway. Looking back, though, thank heavens that, on that fateful day in Saffron Records, I hadn’t plumped for Tales From Topographic Oceans. There are some musical traumas from which you could never have recovered!

For me it’s Close To The Edge which I still love, closely followed by The Yes Album and Going For The One. Definitely “soundtrack of my youth stuff”. I do some writing for Rock and Reel (now RnR) magazine and featured CTTE in an article on their “It Started With A Disc” column about a record which was fundamental in your musical or listening history... still love it...

You have to remember the market/demographic for this programme... the retiree heritage crafts nostalgia brigade. The opportunity to show someone using a spoke shave for 10 seconds is much more important than any work the neck might have actually needed. Similarly, the ability to say “This is restored to how it would have originally looked” to the oohs and aaaahs of a clueless punter with a daytime TV friendly back story is more important than the archaic ergonomic irrelevance of metal bridge and pickup covers...

I recall an interview at the time in Guitarist with Alex and Geddy where they were referring to ESL as their liveish album. As I recall they said that ASoH was 90+% the Birmingham show (and the other show on one track, can’t remember which) but they recorded a lot of shows on the tourand dropped in short samples of segments from other shows where there was a tech or other (presumably playing) glitch. So it was still all “live” in their eyes. They did spend a chunk of time extolling the virtues of the new Akai S1000 Series samplers they were using...

I recall at university being repeatedly asked by a couple of American students what it had been like growing up in oppression under martial law as a child... like I’d gone to school in a mixture of Colditz and 1950s Leningrad! I left it as “Life in Northern Ireland really isn’t quite like that!” and “The situation really isn’t as black and white as Noraid and co paint it.” I didn’t have the heart to mention that (despite coming from a thoroughly non-sectarian and apolitical family) I was “from the other side” and therefore “an enemy of freedom and justice” (their words), if you know what I mean!

Well... The way they hang against the body when on a strap The way they sit against the body when resting on the knee The profile of the neck The width of the neck The string spacing The feel of the varnished fingerboard (on rosewood... why?) The size and mass of the pickups and surrounds is uncomfortable and inconvenient for how I pluck... Reckon that covers it and apart from that they’re my perfect bass ergonomically! 👍🤣 All that said, I’ll never actually own one but I still love the way they sound and they still look absolutely gorgeous and are still one of my fave basses (just not for me)!

I sang in choirs a lot as a kid but when my voice broke I discovered that I really loved singing the bass lines. Fast forward a year or so and my brother, who was in his 20s, played drums in a local covers band. Somehow I managed to convince him to let me come along to one of their practices (so long as I just sat in a corner and didn’t say anything). The bass player had a black, checkerboard binding Ricky and it was the most amazing looking and sounding thing I had ever seen or heard. It looked like it had fallen out of an episode of Flash Gordon. I fell in love with it and knew from that moment on that bass was the instrument for me. It took 3 years of badgering my mum and dad until they bought me a bass and amp - my 18th birthday present (not a Ricky but an Aria SB which I still own). I still love the look and sound of Ricky basses. Sadly I soon found out that I hate pretty much everything about actually playing them!

Possibly my all time fave Rush track!

Indeed, perhaps I should have said "previously unreleased". My inner (and outer) Civil Servant language and grammar pedant hands his head in shame. And you should be envious, it a blooming great collection - esp the tracks of Rory backing Lonnie Donegan, Muddy Waters and Albert King!

Birthday presents... And got the 3 CD box set of unreleased blues tracks by Rory Gallagher...

Sitting in a guitar shop about to start trying out that nice bass and realising I have suddenly forgotten every single bassline I’ve learned in the last 30 years except for Money by Pink Floyd and The Chain by Fleetwood Mac. Every. Single. Time!

You need to hire some stooges at your next few gigs to keep on complaining that the guitar’s way, way too loud!

Probably the single most interchangeable item in all of a band’s gear!

👍

Who knows what counts as provenance on the inter web these days but this Rose Morris article suggests that it is Bobby Sands too... https://rosemorris.com/blogs/news/14900469-bobby-sands-and-his-nobbly-ned-callan-shaftesbury

“The previous owner of this Ned Callan Bass worked for a few touring bands in the 70's, which included The WHO. This Callan Bass had been given to him as a gift. Now, the only prominent musician I can find who ever played a Ned Callan Custom Bass was John Entwistle. So, was this one of John's personal Basses... "WHO" Knows.” Well, the Ox’s Ned Callan Bass was sold at the famous Sotheby’s (or was it Christie’s?) JE Collection so if the owner can’t remember bidding for it then it’s safe to say it wasn’t Mr Entwistle’s bass...

The Necromancer is absolute bottom of the list of my least fave Rush songs. Juvenile sub-Tolkien Hobbit bothering hogwash roughly thrown together and poorly presented... apart from that I love it! 🤣 Fountain Of Lamneth ranks down there next to it, with Bald ranking third from bottom. Didacts and Narpets is the runner up on my least fave pieces of recorded music ever (only beaten by Jewel’s gawd awful version of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer). But like I said, apart from those 36 minutes and 30 seconds of its 45 minute running time, Yup, its a classic! 😂

THAT. IS. JUST. SO. COOL! Props to Gibbo!

Easy, Caress of Steel. End of new thread

I would guess my top three top albums would be Moving Pictures, Grace Under Pressure and Signals. Although id actually be tempted to answer “Any that don’t contain The Necromancer and The Fountain Of Lamneth...” Lakeside Park I’ve always loved but Bastille Day’s the only other track on Caress of Steel that I don’t actively dislike!

It’s also worth finding the remixed versions on Retrospective III - Different from the remastered album and infinitely better than both that and the original. The opening riffing one OLV where Alex seems to be channelling Richard Dale is nothing short of stunning. Check it out...

Make that two of us!

Kudos for bigging up a fabulous band! Love love love Capercaillie! And don’t forget Pilot! Or Kate Bush’s and the Alan Parsons Project’s backing musos if you prefer...!